Organic contaminants, ionic contaminants, and particulate contaminants are key factors that could cause hard disk drive (HDD) failure. Accordingly, it is beneficial to control these types of contaminants to maintain high cleanliness in HDD applications.
The performance of HDDs has consistently progressed resulting in HDDs that have higher storage densities and faster data transfer rates. This has also resulted in HDDs that are more robust and compact in their design. These changes result in more severe requirements on the cleanliness and mechanical properties of the materials used to make these HDDs.
The materials used in making HDDs can generally be divided into metal and plastics. Compared to metal solutions, advanced engineering plastics offer advantages like weight reduction, lower cost, non-corrosive and the ability to form HDDs parts using injection molding, which is suitable for high volume productivity. However, engineering plastics can experience shortcomings such as being less conductive and/or not providing sufficient strength without reinforcement.
As a result, functional fillers such as conductive carbon powder, carbon fiber or sometimes glass fiber will be incorporated with polymers to improve stiffness, dimensional stability and/or electrostatic discharge (ESD) performance. However incorporation of these types of inorganic fillers can adversely affect the flow ability and/or surface quality of the material. Additionally, these fillers can also cause more organic or particulate contaminations in the HDD.
Accordingly, it would be beneficial to provide a material having improved flow that is capable of being used in semiconductor applications, such as HDDs. It would also be beneficial to provide a material having improved mechanical properties but that limits contaminants.